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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Favorite Bookstores Update: Thompson Book Store

A few years ago I did a series of blog posts about my favorite bookstores. The second one was about Thompson's, which had two locations in downtown Fort Worth over the years. I got a comment on that post this morning letting me know that the surviving location (the other one blew up; the story is in the blog post linked above) has been turned into a bookstore-themed cocktail bar, and a pretty cool-looking one, to boot. The place has a Facebook page, which you can see here. There's a photo of the store the way it looked back in the Seventies, and although I'm not in the picture, I easily could have been. I bought a lot of books there. My bar-hopping days are long since over, but I may have to stop in there sometime just for nostalgia's sake. (In the old picture, if you look along the street next to Thompson's, you can see Barber's Bookstore at the far corner. If you walked from Thompson's to Barber's, turned left, and went another block, you'd be at the Fort Worth Public Library. I spent a lot of time in that end of downtown.)

I've lived in Tarrant County since 1982 and used to love to go to Thompson's as well. I could get lost for a couple of hours digging through all the old books upstairs and down. That's where I first heard about J Frank Dobie and started buying some of those books.